


shapeshifter

by seraphecda



Category: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Genre: Multiple Personalities, Post Episode 14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:15:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9376247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphecda/pseuds/seraphecda
Summary: There's more to Hojo Emu than meets the eye, but no one knows how to deal with it when it makes itself known.





	

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: [ medical profession / tattoos ]

It happens when the transformation wears off, _click to save_ , and Hojo Emu is lying facedown on the ground, seconds away from completely passing out.

Taiga watches him, the telltale imprint of the bugster virus prickling across his skin (except there’s something alongside it, seeping into his hairline where his t-shirt covers, his lab coat conceals).

It’s gone in a flash, before he can properly identify it, and Taiga wonders for a moment what else Hojo Emu is hiding from them (whether he knows he is or not).

~

Grips on his waist, Emu wakes up in pain. His eyes blink open slowly, shuttering against the too-bright lights that tell him he’s in the CR. But. This isn’t the break room, where he sneaks naps on the couch. This is…

“We need to talk, intern.”

Calm, confident. Hiiro stares down at him, arms crossed over his chest, but there’s something in his eyes that betrays concern, a furrow that tells Emu that he should be worried too.

“What about?” Emu asks, staring at the white, white ceiling and the white, white walls. He can feels binds around his wrists, too. “Because unless it’s about why I’m strapped to this bed, I’m not—”

“You didn’t undergo the operation to be able to use the driver,” Hiiro starts. “And Taiga…” He stops, tapping a finger against his forearm, the only nervous tick that he really had, the one that never showed up unless, well.

“What?” Emu asks, voice tight.

“You have the virus.”

It’s there, in the air, and it won’t disappear. It hangs, heavy between them, and Emu feels his pulse speed up. “Yeah?” he bites out more than asks.

Emu’s head pounds and it won’t stop, a beat that races like his pulse, and Hiiro’s already got his stethoscope out, scanning his vitals, the furrow between his brows deepening.

“Yeah,” he says. “He won’t say how he knows, but I decided to take precautionary measures before you split again.”

“Split?”

Like his headache, splitting, building, crashing down.

“Multiple Personality Disorder caused by the Game Virus,” Hiiro says calmly, soothingly, and Emu almost feels the pain ebb away. Almost.

It hits him again like a tidal wave and his skin burns in edges, prickling like hot needles.

He screams.

Suddenly the binds make sense. He wonders how many times he thrashed in a near-coma to have been given grips. The thought is lost in white-hot pain that flashes at the backs of his eyes.

Hiiro’s saying something, yelling, panicking. The doors whoosh open and closed and Poppy is here now and _Multiple Personality Disorder caused by the Game Virus_.

(The room goes black before he can piece it together through the pain.)

~

Echoes off silent walls, hushed conversation. No one knows what to do.

“Hojo Emu is a risk,” Hiiro says, and he won’t back down from this even if Poppy gives him her best puppy-eyed expression.

“We need to help him.”

It’s a first in his career. He can cut anything. He knows he can. But this isn’t a normal surgery, it isn’t something he can just carve out and fill up as if it never existed. Because how is he supposed to know which Emu is real when there are two? Which one does he cut off? How does he even…

Poppy, as if realizing the stakes, costume changes into Asuna and frowns, pulling the chair out across from him and sitting down. She folds her arms over the table, carefully, slowly, and Hiiro barely hears her when she asks:

“Can’t we do _anything_?”

There’s a first time for everything. “I don’t know.”

~

Hanaya Taiga sits at his desk, slouched in his chair, wondering when Saiba Niko will shut her fucking mouth about Hojo Emu.

(Never, he concludes, because she’s been at this for weeks now. “Beat M for me! Just do it!”)

“What do you have against him?” Taiga snaps at her finally, when she opens her mouth again to whine at him.

Niko pouts. “Haven’t you been listening, Taiga?” she asks, elongating his name into a high pitch he never wants to hear his name in ever again. “He’s the enemy!”

“Why?” Taiga says, gritting his teeth because maybe he can just out-patient her. “Why does he matter so much to you?”

But she shuts up, finally. Exactly when he didn’t want her to. Exactly when he thought there was a sliver of a chance that he might finally get some damn answers out of her, answers that weren’t just a broken record of “because I want you to!”

“I thought I could count on you,” she says instead, fiddling with her bracelets. “Didn’t you want his gashats? You can only get them from beating him!”

Her logic, while sound, doesn’t account for the fact that things have changed. For the worse.

(He’s not sure beating him is so easy anymore.)

~

Hojo Emu shifts.

He thrashes so hard when in his states that Hiiro relieved him of the burden of his labcoat. And then his jacket. And then his t-shirt too, because re-watching the tapes that recorded the CR Emergency Room made something all too clear: markings on Emu’s skin disappearing as quickly as they appear when his body stresses.

(They haven’t figured out what causes it yet, and none of the CR employees know him well enough to figure it out.)

Hiiro’s deemed them shifts, because he can’t describe it as anything else. It’s the same way his personality shifts into something cocky and much more confident every time he uses the driver, or whenever a game is involved for that matter.

He doesn’t know what to make of any of it.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know,” Hiiro says, and the words are becoming too familiar, uncomfortable, suffocating.

There is no Bugster to excise, nothing’s come out from him, no monster to defeat so it can all just go away. Hiiro wants to call Hanaya Taiga up, but he can’t bring himself to admit that for once, he’s not in control.

He’s invested.

“This is bad,” he says, before turning away and exiting the Emergency Room.

~

Hanaya Taiga finally has his office to himself. Saiba Niko has left him alone for three straight days, too offended to come back to annoy him into helping her. He’s glad for it. He can focus.

Until his phone rings.

It’s 11pm, way past his hours, but the number looks familiar enough that he answers.

He swipes his thumb across the screen and holds it up to his ear. “Hanaya Taiga speaking.”

“Come to the CR.”

Taiga did not expect that. “Why should I go back when you’re the one who doesn’t want me around?”

“So you do want to be here,”

“I never said I wanted to come back.”

“Don’t lie to yourself. I—” Hiiro cuts himself off. Taiga can hear him take a deep breath. “I need you here.”

Taiga definitely did not expect that. “What.”

“Don’t act like you didn’t hear me.”

“Okay then, I’ll bite. Why?”

“Emu’s getting worse.”

“Be there soon,” he says, already out the door.

~

When Asuna sees Kagami Hiiro lead Hanaya Taiga into the CR, she is shocked.

Both of them ignore her waving hands and question marks in favour of heading straight to the Emergency Room.

“So what do you know,” Taiga asks, striding in after Hiiro.

“Nothing aside from that it’s impossible to excise the Bugster from him. It’s a part of him, though I only know this because of your research into the matter,” Hiiro says shortly. “But, he goes through shifts. His body makeup changes. Markings appear.”

Taiga remembers seeing them too, crawling into his hairline, over his shoulders, metallic and silver, a flash of light that he blamed on the sun. But it’s real.

“I’ve seen them,” he admits, and Hiiro’s eyes glance at him with so much unbidden hope that it prompts him to continue. “Like. As if he’s—”

Both of them know the answer. Neither of them can say it.

(Hiiro doesn’t want to believe it.)

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to ibg, who thirsted by my side as i wrote this. why is hojo emu so good.


End file.
